DeConick A.D

95
SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
mother’s beauty and decides to capture it. When he steals her luminous
power, her spirit, she casts Ialdabaoth out of the realm of the immortals
and hides him in a cloud. She does not want the supreme God or the
divinities that populate the divine world to see her monstrously ugly son
or know of his thievery. So she quarantines him outside the divine world.
His exile is the only existence he has ever known, until the moment he
hears the voice thunder down from above him.
Ialdabaoth is even more surprised when man, the archetypal human,
leans through the cosmic ceiling and projects his luminous image in the
waters that make up the underside of the firmament. This event reflects
the Sethian understanding of the opening verses in the Bible in which
God brings forth light. In the Greek translation of Genesis, the word
“light” is the Greek word “ phos ,” which can mean either “light” or “man,”
depending on how the word is accented. The Sethians loved this pun.
They were convinced that this verse taught about primal times, when the
supreme God revealed on the waters the reflection of a luminous, archetypal
man, which was God’s own image.
His stunning appearance causes Ialdabaoth’s entire creation to tremble
and shake with fear. Ialdabaoth and his lieutenants realize that there is a
supreme God who exists above them and who is more powerful than they
can imagine. What are they to do?
They decide to try to reproduce the luminous image of God in their
own realm by creating a human form built from the substances available
to them in the cosmos. They hope to be able to create something as
powerful as the God who had revealed himself in the water by endowing
their creation with their own best features. But they are disappointed. The
creature, Adam, is inert, unable to stand up.
So Ialdabaoth gets the idea to blow his own breath into Adam’s nostrils.
When he does this, he blows into Adam not only his breath but also
the luminous spiritual power that Ialdabaoth had stolen from his mother,
Sophia, although he does not realize this at first. He is an ignorant god
who does not know that he has given away the most powerful thing that
exists, the spirit of the supreme God, by blowing his breath into Adam.
Ialdabaoth’s action does the trick, though. Adam stands up, and he
glows. He is more beautiful than Ialdabaoth and his lieutenants. And
more powerful.
The rulers are immediately seized with jealousy and the realization that
they have given away their greatest features when they constructed Adam.